The paper deals with difficulties faced by students of the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University in Brno while they learn Croatian as a second and foreign language. These complications are caused either by the students' lack of awareness about the nature of a foreign language or their unfamiliarity with the process of translation. The thing is that the students assume that language structures of their mother tongue exist in the same form in the foreign language and as such they could be easily translated and function withing the foreign language system. The paper contains tables with the students' translation solutions confronted with the more suitable suggestions.